Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

86 Chapter 6
At the
international
level, the scale
and energy of
efforts focused
on women’s
property and
inheritance
rights have
grown in
recent years
In India, however, joint titling has had mixed effects (Agarwal 2002). Joint
titles are usually favored in the limited cases where women’s claims to land are
recognized by courts or informal tribunals. Although having some claim to
land is better than no claim, joint titles can create problems, making it difficult
for women to control the produce of the land, to exercise their priorities in land
use if those differ from the priorities of their husbands, to bequeath a portion
of the land as they want, or to claim their shares in case of marital conflict.
Individual titles may give women greater flexibility and control over the land
than joint titles, enabling them to explore alternative institutional arrangements
for cultivation and management. Even then, women often lack funds for
equipment or inputs. Where holdings are very small, individual investment in
equipment can prove uneconomical. Women may also face considerable pressure
from male relatives who want to acquire or control the land.
Collective approaches to support women’s access to land
Agarwal (2002) identifies five types of institutional solutions to these problems.
One is to help women who own individual holdings to invest in capital
inputs jointly with other women, while managing production individually.
A second type of arrangement involves women purchasing land jointly while
owning it individually and farming it collectively. 12 A third possibility is for
women to lease land and cultivate it as a group. 13 A fourth type of institutional
arrangement is for women’s groups to manage and oversee cultivation on land
owned by men. A fifth type of arrangement is for poor rural women to hold
group rights over land distributed by the government or otherwise acquired by
them (Agarwal 2002). 14
More generally, women’s land rights must be complemented by other
changes that enhance women’s access to credit and to important inputs such as
seeds, fertilizers, and new technologies. Credit programs that provide loans for
land and housing purchases can promote joint titling and titling in women’s
names. Improving access to markets for women’s products, through improved
infrastructure and transportation as noted in chapter 5, is also complementary
to the legal changes discussed in this chapter.
International actions
At the international level, the scale and energy of efforts focused on women’s
property and inheritance rights have grown in recent years, spurred by expansion
of the Internet even to remote areas and the continuous efforts by women’s
and rights-oriented networks. The Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women has focused on equality in property
as one of its important directives. The UN Conference on Human Settlements
at its Istanbul meeting in 1996 also focused centrally on women and land.
Since then the Huairou Commission, a network of women’s organizations,
in conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme,